designing processes to develop and act on creative ideas

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I recently finished Shelley Carson’s book on the neural bases of creativity, and it was a pretty interesting read. Carson is a psychology professor at the Harvard Extension School and has been conducting research on creativity for many years.

In Your Creative Brain, Carson’s main thesis of book is that everyone has the potential to be creative. With the exception of some people like Einstein, Carson believes that the difference between highly creative people and ordinary individuals doesn’t lie in differences in neuroanatomy; rather, it is differences in how we activate and switch between certain brain activation patterns that are conducive to creativity that make all the difference. She terms these brain activation patterns that are associated with creativity “brainsets” (akin to the word “mindset”, but more on a neural level). Although highly creative people are able to access and switch between appropriate brainsets easily, she believes that ordinary individuals have the potential to train themselves to do this as well. This is also because people tend to have “mental comfort zones” , and one of the goals of her book is to also move people into trying out other brainsets that they are less comfortable with..

The 7 brainsets which make up her CREATES model include:

The Absorb Brainset, which involves opening one’s mind up to new information and insights from the environment and from other areas of the mind.

And finally, the Stream Brainset, which is the activation pattern observed when one’s thoughts and actions come together harmoniously, otherwise known as Csikszentmilhalyi’s idea of flow or the feeling of being “in the zone”.

Carson describes each of these brainsets, discusses briefly each brainset’s neural bases and offers exercises that one can do to practice invoking each brainset.

Understanding these brainsets is immensely relevant for the “creative cogntion” aspect of my project, since I want to understand how I can incorporate creative cognition findings in the my final design solution. Towards the end of the book, Carson discusses how the brainsets can be applied to various stages of the creative process—namely, that the more “open” and “exploratory” brainsets such as Absorb and Connect should be applied early on in problem-finding and idea generation stages, while “practical” brainsets such as Reason and Evaluate should be applied later on in the process when it’s important to have a feasible plan for executing the idea.

Another opportunity that I see from this book for my project is that while the exercises Carson offers in her book are interesting and grounded in the research, they require a bit of time and commitment to do. She proposes a workout-like program, in which you practice invoking the various brainsets several times a week and reward yourself with small presents. Activities include mentally imagining your car for a few minutes (to practice Envisioning), to playing word association games with yourself (to practice Connecting). While these activities seem engaging, one of the main things that I’ve found in my research so far is that many people already feel like they don’t have enough time as is to be creative, and therefore may prefer more streamlined ways to practice invoking the brainsets (or tools to help them do it). The design implication from this is that while Carson’s insights are definitely valuable, perhaps there is a way to make that information more accessible and integrated into the context of people’s current behaviors and practices, albeit with a slightly greater awareness of the brainsets!

Design Implications

The usefulness and effectiveness of the final design could benefit from understanding and incorporating insights from Carson’s characterization of the seven brainsets

An opportunity exists to help people be more creative by designing something that lets people practice the brainsets within the context of current behaviors

Real-World Creativity

Welcome to my thesis blog! I'm Priscilla, and I'm writing this thesis for my Masters degree in Interaction Design, but more importantly, to satisfy this curiosity I've had for a few years now to learn about how creativity really works, and of course, to design something that can support people being creative. This project should last one year, from Spring 2012 - Spring 2013. Feel free to contact me if you have any comments / feedback at priscilm [at symbol] andrew.cmu.edu.